brave new world quotes

8/13/2019 brave new world quotes

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Chapter 1

I. Ninety -six identical twins working ninety- six identical machines! The voice was almost

tremulous with enthusiasm. You really know where you are. For the first time in history.

[The Director] quoted the planetary motto. Community, Identity, Stability. Millions of

identical twins (7).

An interesting part of what the Director says includes how inherently contradicting

his statements present themselves as. Biologically, identical twins are clones. A clone takes

a certain set of characteristics and applies them to another being, like so many stamps in a

factory, and gradually erases the identity of all the past and future stamps. When people

repeat words, they lose their meanings. Similarly, mindlessly copied humans will lose their

identities, which is the antipode of what the Director declares.

Deconstructing this passage a bit further, readers can realise that perhaps the

Director speaks the truth. If these twins lack a true, unique identity, then maybe they also

lack a where you are. Following from the self -evident logic that a non-person doing

nothing is equivalent to everyone doing everything, it seems that the multitude of identical

twins would obviously know where they are, as if they were blank tags ready to label blank

boxes. Every tag fits on every box.

Expanding on the many hidden probably pedantic meanings in the Directors

words, more esoteric nonsense lies in the mere syntax and structure of the planetary

motto: Community, Identity, Stability. The way Identity lies between Community and

Stability suggests that it is either irrelevant or dependent, maybe both. Often, people slip

the least important objects in a list in the middle. The beginning hooks the reader, the end

leaves a lasting impression, and the middle is just there . This way, Identity can remain


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part of the planetary motto as a subtle piece of propaganda, but ultimately mean nothing.

Identity, in this case, is identity -less. Alternatively, the sequestering of the I-word can hint

at the fact that the identity of the identical twins is inherently linked with community and

stability. Without those, the planetary motto is just Identity, and identity is nothing.

II. And that, put in the Director sententiously, that is the secret of happiness and virtue

liking what youve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their

unescapable social destiny(16).

If someone ever expresses a desire to brainwash a population, albeit in a

misogynistic and out-dated way, please point him or her or [preferred pronoun] to Brave

New World . So many precious tidbits of advice lie between these pages, equipping the

reader with knowledge sufficient enough to start a new civilisation, maybe even start a

brave new world . Huxleys almost adorable concern for the reader can be compared to

Oppenheimer leaving small capsules of yellowcake uranium between the crusty, well-loved

pages of A Guide to Building Your Very Own Atomic Bomb .

This comparison is made not in facetious commentary, but in genuine admiration.

Making people enjoy what they do is key to any successful brainwash, ever 1, because happy

people do not commit murder or start revolutions, they simply exist in contentedly

idleness, which is good for dystopias but not for the church. From a purely logical

standpoint, it is easy to verify that the claim is valid. First, the reader must identify what the

value is, the over-arching goal that all of humanity seeks to achieve. Usually the value is

justice, sometimes morality. In this case, the Director tells the reader that the value is

1 Please do not ask whether this was spoken from experience.


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happiness. Next, the reader should choose a reasonable value criterion that can be used to

measure the value. For instance, how does someone measure happiness? It becomes clear

that the value criterion cannot be extrapolated from the Directors pious wisdom; the

reader must fabricate a value criterion without any help. After all, yellowcake uranium by

itself cannot make a bomb.

An intriguing point to make about the Directors character is that, despite his

sententiously -spoken words, he commits a grammatical blunder. Perhaps Directors of

Hatcheries have better things to worry about than the correct use of unescapable and

inescapable.


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Chapter 2

I. the Head Nurse pre ssed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed

its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps

to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs

moved jerkil y as if to the tug of unseen wires (21).

Apparently, residents of this brave and new world participate in acceptable social

behaviour that includes electrocuting babies.

These people zap small humans with high doses of current and voltage, and Huxley

thinks that describing the screaming would be fun.

There is nothing more to write.

Only joking.

In a way, this passage can represent the entire novel: a paroxysm of twisted social

boundaries, all observed with an expression of complete revulsion and a little confusion,

and packaged neatly in a 4.5 by 7.5 rectangle . Furthermore, the description of tortured

babies feels almost poetic. The comparison between the limbs moving and the pull of wires

juxtaposes these fresh-faced human beings to wooden marionettes, showing that even from

infancy the government controls the citizens every move, playing each of them like a

puppeteer does her toys.

The strange pacing of the electrocutions strikes an uncomfortable chord. Huxley

seems to rest for an indeterm inable amount of time on each descriptor of the babies

bodies, forcing the reader to move on before she has fully comprehended what has

happened, but also ensnaring the reader and making her linger for too long on the

unsettling phrases.


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What else should someone expect from a scene about infant electrocution?

Note that the author gives no description of the Head Nurse. The focus rests entirely

on the babies and their pain, treating the Head Nurse as a mere means to an end, while

portraying babies as the end that the government tries to achieve.

II. the childs mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the childs

mind. And not the childs mind only. The adults mind too all his life long. The mind that

judges and desires and decides made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions

are our suggestions! The Director almost shouted in his triumph. Suggestions from the

State (29).

Someone as qualified and Alpha-plus as the Director should not have to clarify that

the adults mind possesses the same characteristics as the childs. It follows easily that in a

society as controlled as the one in Brave New World , where everything from identity to

zippers are standardised, the brainwashing done to a childs mind will be retained thro ugh

adulthood to death. This leads readers to think that perhaps the Directors strong emotions

clouded his judgment. Though triumph may be a superficial emotion, it nevertheless seems

to hold enough power over the Director to hinder his intellectual abilities.

The way people speak about other natural things such as parents 2 and viviparous

mothers gives rise to a suspicion that they may also consider other natural things, like

emotions, to be vulgar and undesirable. Emotions only hinder logical thinking, as is

2 Parents and following words are not censored due to insufficient knowledge of asteriskplacement.


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evidenced in the Directors redundant remarks, and would probably need to be abolished

in order to streamline society and the workforce.

By reason, an Alpha-plus like the Director should possess limited expression of

emotion, which is clearly not the case. In many previous passages he also shows an

inappropriate amount of emotions when discussing the Hatchery. This smells like a plot

hole, looks like a plot hole, and even walks and talks like a plot hole, but all good logical

thinkers know that correlation is not causation, and perhaps Huxley was just feeling tired

that day; writing about writhing baby limbs must be difficult.

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